Wet Gluten Content of Flour
I’ve wanted to do this for sometime and now I finally tested the wet gluten content (WGC) of my stoneground organic whole wheat that I’ve been using a lot lately. A baker on instagram posted his method and ranges for WGC so I thought I would give it a go.
So the idea is that you hydrate 100 g of your flour with 70 g of water. Knead it into a nice ball and allow it to autolyse for 1 hour. After 1 hour, in a large bowl of water, you massage your dough ball, releasing the starch and bran from the ball. The water gets dumped and replaced by fresh water. Repeat until the water is clear and all you have left is a web of gluten. This gluten web is squeezed to try to remove as much water as possible and left to dry for another hour and finally squeezed again and weighed.
His scale for quantity of gluten in flour goes like this:
50+ excellent.
40-50 Good
30-40 medium
20-30 poor
< 20 low grade
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My whole wheat ended up measuring 35 g WGC, so by his scale is a medium for gluten content. I’m thinking that my adding VWG when baking with this flour at 100% is probably a good idea.
Have you guys tried this? What do you think about his scale and the method? Do you think it is useful?
Benny